Thumbsucker (24 page)

“I liked the scenes of the pioneers the best. The sacrifices those women made. Incredible.”

“
Mr
. Cobb?”

Mike didn’t answer immediately. He had the about-to-sing look on his face. Tiny muscles struggled near his mouth. His eyes were dreamy, absent.

I flared a look at him. “It was great,” I said.

Mike seemed to recover slightly. “Very emotional. Very professional job. Realistic heart attack.”

Elder Knowles looked thrilled. “That actor, you might like to know, is a convert. He’s actually a bishop in Los Angeles. There’s lots of Mormons in entertainment these days. There’s a rumor around that we might get Elton John soon.”

“The famous singer,” Mike said. “ ‘Rocket Man.’ ”

“One of his all-time best,” said Elder Knowles. He began to hum the melody. Elder Jessup sang some of the words. Then Mike joined in.

But it was a false alarm. Just normal singing. It ended after half a verse and Audrey went to the kitchen for the date bars.

Although we were only halfway through our lessons and still four weeks away from being baptized, we started attending Sunday services at the nearest Mormon church. Thirty miles away in north St. Paul, the chapel was built of pale yellow brick and looked like a clinic or elementary school. The only color was an American flag in a bed of budding daffodils. The flagpole was even higher than the steeple, which seemed odd to me. Also, the steeple was plain—it lacked a cross. I asked Elder Jessup how come.

“Let’s think it through. Say Jesus Christ had been murdered by a firing squad. Would people put sculptures of rifles on their churches? Or say he’d been hung. With a noose.”

I pictured these scenes.

“Anything else?” Elder Jessup said. “Don’t be the least bit embarrassed. It’s what I’m here for.”

“Preexistence still confuses me sort of. Let’s say I have children someday.”

“Of course you will.”

“Well, my children already exist as spirits, right? So does that mean they’re watching everything I do trying to decide if they still want me and how they’re going to help me out in life?”

Elder Jessup nodded. “That’s basically accurate. Why? Does it scare you?”

“It makes me dizzy.”

“That’s natural. You’re taking in lots of new information
these days at a pretty incredible pace. I’m proud of you.”

The next Sunday was a fast Sunday. Except for Joel, who’d eaten an English muffin when Audrey became concerned about his blood sugar, we arrived at the chapel with empty stomachs. Mike seemed grumpy and tired, but I felt fine; pleasantly light-headed and alert. Elder Jessup seemed cheerful, too, but Elder Knowles, a much huskier kid, looked dazed. He had his digital watch on upside down and there were oozing shaving cuts on his chin.

The meetings and services lasted half the day. Audrey went to Relief Society, the organization for Mormon women, while Mike joined the elders at a priesthood meeting. Joel and I went to a younger priesthood meeting. All faithful Mormon males were priests, I’d learned, and possessed such powers as healing and tongues, which Elder Jessup explained to me once as the ability to translate languages, both foreign and ancient, without studying them.

The topic in priesthood that morning was survival. The church believed in preparing for emergencies and all Mormon families were urged to stockpile two years’ worth of food and water, I learned. Various methods of storage were discussed and soy pellets were praised for their longevity. I left the meeting depressed. The goal of outliving the general population after a nuclear war or major catastrophe seemed selfish to me. And lonely. Very lonely.

At the sacrament service following the meeting a squad of teenage boys in suits and ties passed around silver trays of torn-up bread and tiny paper cups of water. It was the elders’ first food of the day, but the rest of us had to pass. We weren’t full Mormons yet.

Afterward, when we were finally free to eat, we drove the elders to a Perkins restaurant. The elders tucked their ties inside their shirts and dove into their sausage links and hotcakes, surprising me with their lazy table manners. Mike ate an omelet bursting with orange cheese and Audrey and I had Belgian waffles piled high with berries and banana slices, while Joel ordered oatmeal from the Lite-Line menu.

“So?” said Elder Jessup, leaning back once we’d cleaned our plates. “Think you can do it?”

“I feel good,” said Audrey.

“Describe that feeling.”

“The church is like a community,” she said. “It’s not just us on our own now. Just the four of us. We have all these new friends who want the best for us.”

“Joel?” Elder Jessup said.

“I’m scared. The war. In priesthood they said there’s going to be a war maybe.”

The elders looked at each other with merry eyes. “Don’t you go worrying,” Elder Jessup said. “That war won’t be for a while, and you’ll live through it.”

“We all will,” Elder Knowles said. “Guaranteed.”

It was my turn to comment. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like our family had gotten itself into something
that we might have trouble getting out of. If only I could remember my preexistence. If only I could remember what I’d seen when I’d surveyed our future before my birth.

“You keep thinking, Justin,” Elder Jessup said. He turned to Mike. “So tell us: is it a go?”

“Whatever they want. They seem happy.”

“What do
you
want? You’re the father. The decision maker.”

The waitress came with our check then. She seemed unsure about whom to give it to, so she tucked it under the pepper shaker in the middle of the table. Mike slipped it out. He reached behind himself, got out his wallet, drew out a credit card, and held it high, trying to catch the waitress’s attention. Everybody started chatting again, as if we’d forgotten a question had been asked. When it was time to go and we stood up together, I saw Elder Jessup open a small brown date book and scribble “Cobb baptism” across one square.

Audrey moved a step stool into the liquor closet and started handing things down to me: pint and quart bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka, packets of powdered margarita mix, jars of cocktail onions, tins of cherries. I packed everything in a cardboard box lined with plastic so it wouldn’t leak, then taped the box shut and got another one. The last item was a stack of paper napkins printed with truth-or-dare-style party questions. “Have
you ever pinched a waitress? Where?” “How long was your worst-ever hangover, in days?”

“I feel like I ought to donate all this junk,” Audrey said as she stepped down from the stool. “Who to, though? The VFW? The Elks?”

Next we collected tobacco products. Raiding drawers and closets all over the house, we threw away pipe cleaners, ashtrays, lighters, matches. Mike talked about keeping a couple old briar pipes—one of them had been his grandfather’s, he said—but Audrey advocated a clean sweep. We crushed packs of cigarettes, tossed out cans of snuff, and even got rid of the filthy mason jars Mike kept in his workshop as spittoons.

“Maybe we’re going overboard,” he said as Audrey twist-tied another garbage bag. “It feels like we’re sacrificing family history.”

“We are,” Audrey said. “That’s the point. Be ruthless, baby.”

Tea and coffee things went next, including a new Mr. Coffee machine that Audrey had bought the same day the elders showed up. On top of it we piled magazines—
Esquire
s and
Vogue
s and
Harper’s Bazaar
s. We saved our
National Geographic
s and Mike’s
Field and Stream
s but discarded some old
Life
s. The difference between the publications seemed clear to us.

But we still weren’t finished. We kept finding things. Decks of cards. Poker chips. A Ouija board. I knew that the project had gotten out of hand when I saw Audrey hovering near the shelf containing the series of Time-Life
Ancient Mysteries books that Joel had secretly ordered off TV once by memorizing the number on Mike’s Visa card:

“What are these about exactly?” she asked me.

“They’re fine,” I said. “They’re the only books he reads. One’s about Stonehenge.”

“Joel, can you come here?” she yelled.

She thought for a moment and then called out, “Forget it.” Then, to me:

“I’m losing it. Need food.”

The porch was overflowing with boxes and bags by the end of the day, but rather than hauling them out to the street for the garbage truck, Mike insisted on driving them to the dump. I volunteered to go with him but he said no. I suspected he wanted to salvage a few things.

I woke up early the morning of our baptism and waited in the kitchen for the elders. Audrey was still at work and Mike was sleeping. Joel was in the bathroom, learning to tie a tie. I boiled water for Postum, a coffee substitute that Mike complained tasted like moldy toast but drank by the mugful nevertheless, then opened my Book of Mormon for a quick, last skim.

Audrey came in yawning from her night shift.

“Bad one. Full moon. Lots of accidents,” she said. She spooned some Postum into a blue cup. “You ready?”

“I am. I’m all dressed.”

“That tie looks nice on you. Is that one of Mike’s? It’s so dashing.”

“It’s mine,” I said. “Elder Knowles helped me pick it out.”

“That lifts my spirits. Maybe we won’t lose touch with everything, after all.”

While Audrey was upstairs changing into a dress, the elders drove up in a borrowed car and came to the door with a bouquet of flowers. I put them in water, then read the clipped-on note: “Your Heavenly Father welcomes you to his garden.”

“We’re going to drive you ourselves,” said Elder Jessup. “I hope that’s okay with your folks. It’s safer.”

“How?”

“The devil loves to play tricks at the last minute. He might cause a wreck or something. We’ve seen it happen.”

I heard a toilet flush upstairs and wire hangers scraping on a clothes bar. Joel appeared in the kitchen with his tie tied wrong, its thin part hanging lower than its fat part. Elder Knowles said, “I’ll show you a trick,” and started adjusting it.

“The thing I still wonder,” I said to Elder Jessup, “is how you knew. How you knew we needed you. Is that preexistence, too?”

“God led us here.”

“Go ahead and tell him,” Elder Knowles said. “He’ll be out on a mission of his own soon.”

Elder Jessup fiddled with his cuffs. “My partner and I are detectives, in a way. We scout around for clues. For leads. We hear things.”

“You saw him somewhere. You caught him singing,” I said.

“No,” Elder Jessup said. “It’s nothing like that.”

I sensed him growing nervous, backing off. I faced Elder Knowles, who’d just finished arranging Joel’s tie.

“This town has an LDS pharmacist,” he said. “Sometimes we eat dinner at his house. Don’t worry, he’s not a spy, just very helpful. He gets concerned about certain customers, the ones who are maybe taking too much medicine.”

“The store where we get our prescriptions?” I said. “The
Rexall
?” I was shocked; this seemed illegal. Unfair.

“Tim, that was stupid,” Elder Jessup said. “That was idiotic. What a moron. Somebody’s going to kick your Mormon butt for that.”